Related Posts:Beau­ti­ful post-snow sun­rise over Baltimore

Posts tagged: BWI

Sunset drive to BWI

December 28, 2010, 12:20 pm | View Comments

As I left Bal­ti­more and merged onto south­bound 95, a post-snow sun­set lit the clouds on fire. Even the plume from the Bal­ti­more smoke­stack par­tic­i­pated and turned pur­ple against the win­ter twi­light. I approached the air­port loop and watched planes ascend in sil­hou­ette. The light didn’t dim right away after the sun set, but instead shifted from vibrant gold and pink to deep orange. Traf­fic slowed as awestruck dri­vers gazed into the sky. It looked invit­ing, and I got excited about being in the air, a big deal for a guy whose whole body goes rigid dur­ing take-offs and landings.

We were for­tu­nate to miss the brunt of the storm over Christ­mas. Just east of us, other parts of Mary­land got nearly ten inches of snow. Had the winds blown dif­fer­ently or the storm tracked just a few miles west of where it went, we would have got­ten ham­mered, and my flight to Atlanta would have been can­celed. But I got lucky, and my flight only ran 33 min­utes late.

By the time I got my car sit­u­ated in long-term park­ing and shielded myself in a bus shel­ter from the razor-sharp gusts of icy wind, the hori­zon was blood red. Air­planes tax­ied, and the warm-colored light shim­mered on their alu­minum bod­ies. I was joined by a fam­ily head­ing home from the hol­i­days. The kids com­pared notes about new video games they got, and the exhausted-looking par­ents braced them­selves against the cold that still found its way into the shel­ter. When the bus arrived to take us to the ter­mi­nal, the show in the sky was over, hav­ing faded through pur­ples to navy blue to black.

Related Posts:

By Gavin St. Ours Tags: , , , , , , ,